Flight 209, now arriving at gate 8... gate 9... gate 10...

Well, strictly speaking, I played golf once before -- during a bachelor party -- but I don't think that counts. :-)

Tim took me to a golf course in Naco, Arizona. He's been an avid golfer for a long time, apparently -- he even golfed competitively in high school. Naco is about 30 minutes southeast from Sierra Vista. There's a big fence that goes through the middle of the town that divides the US from Mexico. Amazing.

We got there pretty early, so Tim took me to the driving range and we hit balls for about an hour. He gave me the basics of how to swing, etc. I even had a few decent shots. We paired up with two other guys (Jeff and Martin) and teed off around 8:30am.

Needless to say, even though I had the random decent shot, my game was pretty dismal. The other guys were remarkably patient. All in all, it was pretty fun.

It was fairly cold when we started; when the sun came up, the wind started. It was really windy! Unfortunately, the wind never died down, and the sun wasn't enough to make it warm, so it was a cold wind. So Tim and I ended up only playing 9 holes -- we were sufficiently wind burned and cold as hell, so we took a rain check from the club to get the remaining 9 holes. Jeff and Martin continued on (after 2 shots of tequila to warm up, of course!).

I have a lot of work to do on my swing before I go back for those last nine holes.

ND's got a new football coach. All I know about this guy is that we stole him from Georgia Tech.

ND just stole their OIT director, as well.

Good luck!

The TV show Alias rocks. It's got all kinds of delectable twists and turns. Good stuff!

I bought some audio tapes this past weekend and have started taping some of my CDs so that I have something to listen to in the car (remember that the radio stations suck here in Sierra Vista). These tapes sound much better than my 10-15 year old tapes... imagine that!

On Sunday, I helped install the Symantic Raptor firewall at work. None of us had any experience with firewalls, so it took a few tries and some trial and error to get it to do what we needed to do. We actually left the firewall in a secondary role to the proxy servers so that we could continue to tweak the firewall over the next week and gradually migrate all the users to it.

Unfortunately, what we didn't know is that there are a significant number of remote users who use MS Outlook to connect to our MS Exchange server. We discovered that on Monday morning when they all started calling asking why they couldn't connect to the Exchange server anymore ('cause the firewall was blocking them). Doh. :-(

We fought with the firewall all friggen' day and couldn't get it to allow Outlook clients to connect from outside. Arrgghh!!! Needless to say, many users were pretty upset. Oops. :-(

"I fought the firewall, and the 'wall won..."

So we ended up backing out the entire firewall configuration and restoring the original setup. We'll try again this upcoming weekend. Blech.

I also toured the Army Signal Command (ASC) Theater Network Operations and Security Center (TNOSC). It's in a Secure Compartmentalized Information Facility (SCIF) -- you have to have a security clearance to get in. Indeed, MAJ F and I had to to surrender our cell phones at the entrance, as well as be escorted at all times during the tour, and several people had to turn off/cover up their monitors while we were in there.

It was kinda neat, actually -- the TNOSC is the help desk for the entire Army in the continental US. They have operators that answer calls for problems ranging from password lockouts to entire installation (as in an Army Major Command [MACOM], such as Southern Command, Forces Command, etc.) network connectivity issues. Calls generate trouble tickets that get passed off to an army of engineers (no pun intended -- there are a large number of engineers who actually do the problem solving!).

They also monitor the security of the entire army.mil network. There's a big row of monitors for all the IDS detectors -- all the IDS information in army.mil comes into this one room. Cool stuff.

The OSCAR group moved the weekly teleconference to Tuesday afternoons -- so I can now participate. Woo hoo! Previously, the weekly teleconf was on Wednesday mornings during our weekly briefing from Ilex, our main contractor -- something I couldn't really skip.